Book Reviews

Rothberg’s innovative and panoramic book about collective responsibility for the legacies of historical injustice is a pertinent addition to the esteemed cata-logue of the Stanford series Cultural Memory in the Present. Its pertinence derives in part from its effort to bring an emergent critical consciousness about the fuller arc of systemic harm to the attention of its readers. Those are likely to include thinking or educated publics in America or elsewhere which Rothberg sees as implicated in the reproduction of historical categories of harm (typi-cally race) worldwide. He writes within an eclectic and multi-aspected tradi-tion of cultural studies (22). How such a thesis tracks beyond the state and cultural theory for those interested in telling international legal history is less clear. For that reason, this review will try to outline what Rothberg’s case adds, for that group, to the narrative range of international legal history.

hierarchical groupings; and often, its immunity to legal intervention. If there is an upside, implication is also processual which means the genealogical line which the implicated subject inherits can break.
Rothberg's task is to show how to interrupt the intergenerational pattern of violence by inciting the implicated subject to take 'responsibility' for the living genealogy of violence. To take responsibility means 'to reflect on and act against our implication' (10) in a system that 'we enable and a history of aborted justice that we benefit from in manifold ways' (10). To 'act against implication' differs from traditional forms of collective protest (in the streets/ squares or more recently, via social media platforms) by being mindful of the risks of centring the implicated ego or of reproducing negative historical tropes. The potency of the insurrectional act proposed by Rothberg depends on the implicated subject's conscious gesturing against the logic of normative orderings which allow historical assumptions to continue.
Neither the diagnosis nor the call to collective responsibility is novel, though the concept of implication nuances the debate by introducing a new language to explain why structural violence continues to pivot in foreseeable and preventable directions. What is innovative is how the book makes the implicated subject visible in new relief and theorises its protagonist's tasks. Rothberg casts the net of implication as wide as possible in 244 pages. He draws on a complex and often dizzying set of interactions, forewarning his readers that '[e]xploring implication is a messy business' (23), before plunging into an ever-deepening pool of theories, situations and cultural responses from which he synthesises the start of a programme for action. Rothberg frequently uses the descriptor, 'multidirectional' , to register the difficulty of scoping the realm of implication and its flipside, the privileged collective which is responsible for it, and the plurality of forms responsibility might take.
The Implicated Subject stages its multidirectional case by mapping the conceptual field of implication as a type of collective responsibility for past injustices (part I: Long-Distance Legacies) which expands by a series of critical displacements or intersecting wrongs (part II: Complex Implication), before exploring how 'activist internationalism' -especially, as an aesthetic category -can counteract its negative effects (part III: Long-Distance Solidarity). Each part consists of two chapters which address, in turn, how implication fills gaps in traditional human rights and social justice discourses (chapter 1); how implication informs the structural legacies of racial slavery (chapter 2); the simultaneity between different forms of racism such as in apartheid and then, post-apartheid South Africa for South African Jews (chapter 3); indirect genealogies of harm such as in Israel-Palestine where different forms of historical injustice refigure the memories and responsibilities of the Jewish diaspora today (chapter 4); the insurrectional potential of internationalist aesthetics (chapter 5) and, finally, how internationalist aesthetics critically expose internationalism as implication and as a mode of resistance to its negative effects (chapter 6).
The international lawyer will notice itself in these conceptual spaces even if it is never called out directly and the activist potential of law is opaque, especially when rules or rights often permit injustice. If getting a handle on implication and what to do about it is 'messy' due to its range and depth, that is also true of the remedial chance that follows from its theorisation.
The infinite possibilities for acting against implication mean the cycle of historical justice is equally contingent and open, including to new forms of activism including those imagined by the international lawyer. The book invites the international lawyer's attention by referencing events, themes, and concepts in places familiar to global regulation. Human rights and civil rights vocabularies and literatures draw its interest more keenly, especially as well-known interventions by historians, sociologists, and political thinkers (e.g., Iris Marion Young, Samuel Moyn, Charles Mills, Robert Meister, Bruce Robbins, Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider) and some legal scholars (e.g., Kimberlé Crenshaw) inform the framing of key chapters (chapters 1, 5 and 6). The Implicated Subject also references fundamental human rights documents and related fields of international regulation or institutional practice (31)(32)(33)(34)(35)(156)(157)(158). There is, however, no satisfaction for the legal scholar interested in closer normative critique other than to point out that there is still much to do and much interdisciplinary work to begin.
The Implicated Subject contemplates the extension of such activism beyond cultural studies (to legal, political, critical race or memory studies) and beyond the state, including to the fields of implication mediated by international lawyers as North-South inequality, de/colonisation, genocide, humanitarianism, transitional justice, and post-Cold War human rights etc. Close attention to these themes as legal themes is not, however, Rothberg's priority. Moreover, his book does not undertake the kind of methodological mapping that might have immediate traction with international law. Rothberg's self-conscious positioning within the privileged camp (and within it, as part of the Jewish diaspora in America) explain the narrowing of his study to methods apposite to his cultural expertise and further, to themes which resonate with his perception of his privilege (18). These include the legacies of racial slavery in America, the Shoah and its reverberation in various warzones or other locations of state-led violence, the intergenerational divisions which follow the exiled Jew further afield or and finally, to the ambivalent martyrdom of a German-born freedom fighter in Kurdistan.

Book Reviews
Journal of the history of International Law 24 (2022) 135-147 The reason why broad references to legal phenomena matter for studying implication is clear despite Rothberg's conscious effort to separate his project from legal traditions. The conceptual register of implication borrows from the technical repertoire of law, referring to the legal categories of guilt, responsibility, victim, witness, testimony, perpetrator, bystander etc., which Rothberg reorientates with the help a plethora of famous twentieth-century thinkers (e.g., Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Michel Foucault, Karl Jaspers, Nancy Fraser, Wendy Brown, Alain Badiou) and wide-ranging aesthetic examples from popular culture to avant-garde film. The reorientation of legal concepts, themes, geographies, and temporalities for implication explains why law does not matter more.
The normative resonances of The Implicated Subject are, consistent with the generalised critique of legal phenomena, peripheral to its cultural and political inquiry. Rothberg explains, developing the lines he borrows from Arendt as his book's epigraph, that legalism is inadequate to the tasks of recuperating the present from the past. Arendt envisages a communal and political response is necessary because '[t]his vicarious responsibility for things we have not done ... is the price we pay for the fact that we live our lives not by ourselves but among our fellow men' .1 Arendt's reframing of guilt agrees with Rothberg's insight that 'our models of responsibility must leave behind the individualist assumptions of liberal legal culture and its emphasis on individualized guilt and consider instead what it means to act collectively' , for good and for bad, close-up and at a distance (48). That is, how are the positive and the negative aspects of collective responsibility not only legal, political, historical, philosophical, or local but always 'multidirectional' . The myriad of forms that political community offers for taking account of our implication opens the space of justice and moreover, the spaces of activist politics, to non-legal forms.
The multi-directional scale of the dynamics outlined in The Implicated Subject unsettles the normative focus that is typical of international legal thought in at least two distinctive ways. Rothberg theorises the humanist concerns of global regulation in an unfamiliar critical voice that deliberately seeks authority from its placement within complex theoretical and aesthetic traditions. These are mostly outside law. The fields of shared normative concern are general in character and usefully mark end-goals (justice, equality, freedom, reparations, etc.) or thematic orientations (race, sex, slavery, immigration, imperialism, armed conflict, economics etc.), rather than, as the lawyer might, a set of technical resources for legalistic reform. Moreover, when Rothberg references civil or human rights discourse, and this is especially so in its internationalist angle, he uses it as a point of departure for an alternative account of human rights violations and their aftermaths and cultural forms resistance (35,(154)(155)(156)(157)(158).
In both respects, implication shifts the typical framework for thinking and reading the critical history of humanist international law by arguing that justice requires fluency in extra-legal and extra-governmental vocabularies. The Implicated Subject agrees with critical human rights scholarship that rights are inadequate though disagrees with its familiar premise, that rights ought to deliver, by looking elsewhere. The book hesitates, however, to state its departure more provocatively. Rothberg reassures critical human rights scholars that he concurs with their conclusions and further, that their discourses remain 'particularly salient for an exploration of the implicated subject' on account of his shared concern for injustice, memory, and cross-border solidarity (156). Such 'salience' differs from historical, philosophical, sociological, normative, or diplomatic approaches to human rights even though Rothberg uses the framework of implication to ask for the same things. Implication supplements international human rights by reorientating its central concerns in aesthetic politics and by shifting the focus from the immediate injury to -consistent with the words of Arendt used as an epigraph for the book -the different imperative of 'taking upon ourselves the consequences for things we are entirely innocent of' as the price paid, after the historical fact and because of its reappearance, for our privilege.2 The viewpoint that becomes progressively clearer by Rothberg's juxtaposition of projects is that the limits of humanist law frustrate its potential to change the persistent, embedded biases which divide and structure the contemporary world. It is also clear that implication remains a problem, 'not something to celebrate' and certainly, 'not a solution' , and that not problematising its persistence as the structural memory of violence delays legal progress toward justice (200). For example, the prevailing normative binary between victims and perpetrators, even where it recognises a neutral bystander or accessory, obscures the opportunities that arise from framing implication as an analytical and activist category. So too, the concern of human rights practice and theory for uneven economic distributions, or post-empire redistributions, leaves the implicated subject in the shadows of persistent global inequality as, at best, a hesitant beneficiary, or worse, as an accessory to or protagonist of capitalist interests and states. The ambiguities and the multiple aspects of implication as the contemporary and always recurring legacy of past injustices are left intact by such discourses.
Rothberg draws from critical rights scholarship (esp., Levy, Sznaider, Moyn, Robbins) to state his criticism of rights more bluntly. This deference is a frustrating aspect of Rothberg's intervention (and characteristic of his engagement with theoretical sources) because it underestimates the power of implication to do the same critical work, independent of whether a human rights framework 'risks depoliticizing -and thus reproducing -the relations of power that produce human rights violations in the first place' or that 'the take-off of the human rights framework has coexisted with skyrocketing economic inequality' (158). The process character of the interlacing networks of implication studied by Rothberg (chapters 1-4) elucidates what laws do not abridge and make the case for the activist explorations that follow (chapters 5-6). His engagement with primary aesthetic sources -social media campaigns, film, literaturetells international lawyers why they are the implicated subject because of their privilege and why they are bound to use that understanding to act against it.
The Implicated Subject arguably makes its most innovative manoeuvre for legal history by outlining non-legal and non-diplomatic forms of internationalism that Rothberg labels 'critical internationalism' and 'affirmative internationalism' (153). The diagnostic and strategic investigations of the book propose a reworking of the internationalist project as a radical field for addressing implication and by which the implicated subject becomes an activist. The 'new' internationalisms are cosmopolitan and, like the concept of implication, best understood as 'multidirectional' and so challenge the lawyer to see the fuller '"world"-travelling' contexts in which legal phenomena occur (159). Such internationalisms are aesthetic and offer 'politicized forms of remembrance' which act against implication by cultural interventions which explore the echoes of violence in disparate situations and temporalities (159). Aesthetic examples (esp. film and literature) become fields of critical internationalism which 'witness at a distance' (186) to counter unexpected networks of domination or memory as well as highlighting the ambiguous relationship between implication and solidarity (chapters 5 and 6).
The complexity of the tasks outlined by Rothberg require a different competence for the telling of legal history than sifting diplomatic, normative, and political traffics and are frequently, for that reason, discouraging for a lawyer. How can an international lawyer use the conceptual framework of implication to tell legal history and progress the humanist potential of law when no law, however utopian or well-intentioned, leaves injustice in the past? Rothberg Book Reviews Journal of the history of International Law 24 (2022) 135-147 leaves the reader with a very helpful list which synthesises his well-written, richly referenced, and provocative argument as 'the point of departure' for further study (202)(203). The Implicated Subject offers the lawyer or legal historian no specific signposts for reorientating or rather, deepening, its expertise. Rather, the book gestures to its responsibility as an obvious example of the implicated subject and by the logical inference, invites it to develop new eloquence in critical internationalism. The book emphasises the innumerable resources at the lawyer's disposal that necessarily extend its archive beyond the memory of past injustice and normative responses to it. Aesthetics may not, however, appeal to every lawyer or complement its disciplinary expertise.
The book inspires traditional legal narratives in another way-by introducing a new scale of history and further, by mandating the responsibility that accompanies narration. When telling legal history, for instance, the lawyer necessarily entangles the past of law with multiple other histories -not one harm but multiple intersecting forms of harm. These histories necessarily reproduce multiple, intersecting legacy patterns that follow the past as memory into the present. The methodological invitation means that legal history is equally about what happened as it is also 'about the history of memory and the future of testimony' (168).
Perhaps, even more striking, is the confrontation that necessarily follows for the author of legal history who, in tracking history as memory and legacy, is also the implicated subject of that narrative. The activist dimension of internationalism is, in Rothberg's estimation, most potent in the efforts of the implicated subject to cultivate a self-reflexive attitude which is at once political and personal (168,190). Our implication means that the privilege of writing international legal history comes with a collective responsibility to not use our privilege negligently or maliciously but as an opportunity for critical internationalism. This means finding ways to express solidarity 'at a distance' because our privileges and our memories of injustice are not the same as those we remember or support. 'Nous ne sommes pas tous des juifs allemands' and, no implicated subject, irrespective of its skin, religion, sex etc., can be profiled in the same way as the African-American youth who was walking home and wearing a hoodie, as was Trayvon Martin in Florida on 26 February 2012 (chapter 1 and conclusion).

Deborah Whitehall
Institute for International Law and the Humanities, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia deborah.whitehall@unimelb.edu.au